The present embodiments relate to on-demand services in a fog computing environment. More specifically, the embodiments relate to selective pushing and removal of services in the fog computing environment to support real-time service support.
Fog computing is a de-centralized computing infrastructure in which computing resources and application services are logically and efficiently distributed. The goal of fog computing is to reduce data transport to a shared data resource, e.g. cloud based resource, for data processing, analysis and storage. In a fog computing environment, processing takes place local on one or more network connected devices, gateways, and edge server(s). Data is gathered, processed and stored within the network on the edge server(s).
With respect to a network of shared resources, referred to herein as the cloud, the fog computing environment extends computing resources closer to devices that produce and act on the data. Analyzing data on an edge node in the fog computing environment brings the processing in close proximity to the data, thereby minimizing latency. The edge node(s) is connected to the cloud, and as such, processing may take place local to the edge node, or it may be transported to a cloud resource for processing. Designation of processing locations may be based on characteristics associated with the data and time-sensitive requirements, if any. Accordingly, the fog computing configuration provides a processing layer that extends data processing proximal to the origin of the data.